Emory spent the morning beside Isolde's high chair in a long apparently satisfying conversation that I could only partially follow, because Isolde's half was conducted primarily in assessing gaze and satisfaction sound. At one point she put her hand on his arm — the deliberate grip, the one she used for the people she had decided belonged — and Emory said yes, I know in the quiet register and neither of them required anything further.
After lunch, when Marisol and Dax had gone to the kitchen and Isolde was napping, Emory sat with me in the sitting room and said: "You look like the photograph."
"Which one," I said.
"The naming ceremony," he said. "Marisol had it framed. It sits on the desk in the study." He paused. "You have that look now all the time. In photographs, in the room, at the
